War as the Reincarnation of Ideas

 

In the center of Campo Santo Stefano, among the passers-by, stands a white flag hoisted to half-mast. It appears torn to shreds by a pack of bloodthirsty wolves. The wind does not pass through it, nor touch it, nor move it. It is as rigid as a dead body wrapped in a shroud. The author of this compelling installation, Sarajevo-born artist Šejla Kamerić, was supposed to represent Bosnia and Herzegovina this spring at the 60th Venice Biennale in 2024 – but at the last moment she was cancelled. The sectarian government back home couldn’t, it seems, imagine anything else but nationally exclusive representation, so in the end only the sculptor of sacral monuments that answer the requirements of the official rhetoric was sent to the Biennale. All this follows on the heels of the recently announced discussions on Bosnia and Herzegovina’s potential entry into an increasingly warmongering European Union. For this reason she and her work have literally been censored.
For Kamerić, art is a caustic, political, and subversive language – in contrast to the precepts of cancel culture and the dominant groupthink. The artist’s work is present in the world’s most prestigious museums: among her works, in addition to the well-known “Bosnian Girl” (2003), are posters of the two war criminals Ratko Mladić and Radovan Karadžić (2003), then sought by the International Tribunal in The Hague – bearing the ironic inscription “Warrant” instead of “Wanted”. The two words, similar yet antonymous, unmask the hypocrisy of power that licks with a protean tongue at the rot it itself generates, perpetuating the spread of its every metastasis. Though now she will not be part of the Biennale, the artist will still be in Venice with the work “Cease”, a striking symbol of denunciation supported by the Ars Aevi Museum of Contemporary Art and curated by Giulia Foscari. Kamerić, who as a young girl survived the siege of Sarajevo, today announces the death of every notion of peace; denies any negotiation by polarizing governments that finance the death industry, control entire economic flows, and militarize societies. How can an artist, who has experienced the psycho-physical terror and devastation of war not oppose with all her might the deadly project of a world conflict in which there is no going back? In the endless, opaque post-war collective slumber of Bosnia, Kamerić shouts into the deafening silence. The torn white flag is marbleized, frozen, rigid, created by the artist before Pope Francis affirmed “the courage of the white flag” to the choral dismay of the world’s leaders. The white flag at half-mast is a hymn to life – despite everything. It is an anti-monument, a frightening blank page on which all our names could be written, in turn rendering it entirely black, if we do not urgently oppose the fatal reincarnation of certain ominous ideas.

 

Manuela Gandini is a contemporary art critic, curator, and lecturer at NABA in Milan. She writes for “La Stampa” and “Il Manifesto” and edits the Forms section of the “Machina” magazine. She is the author of the book “Ileana Sonnabend: The Queen of Art” (Castelvecchi 2008) and the film “Leo Castelli: The Lord of Art” (RAI 19923) and curator of various exhibitions.